More Than Magic (9 page)

Pooka stood in front of him, tongue lolling, apparently not sure whether to go for his throat or lick him.

“Am I glad to see you,” he said, looking up at Grace as he sank to his knees in front of the dog. “I thought I was a goner.”

Lovely.

Mr. City Man was kneeling in front of
her
dog in the middle of
her
trail to
her
sang bed and for just a moment he hadn’t looked at all like the convalescent who had checked in last night. In fact, she had regretted coming up here without her 12-gauge. But now he looked like he was going to throw up.

Grace took a deep breath. A million questions tumbled through her brain and adrenaline made her hair stand on end. Was Nick merely another guest who got lost out here thinking his fabulously expensive GPS would save him? Was he following her? Why on earth would a very sick man—because he was clearly still ill whether he would admit to it or not—get up at an ungodly hour to follow her into the cold damp of these woods?

She looked at the perspiration beading on his upper lip with a clinical eye. He was either running a fever or really scared. And she honestly couldn’t tell which without whipping out her thermometer.

Was he after the sang? Not in his condition. He couldn’t dig it up or transport it, but he might be trying to map its location for future digging. But why? He didn’t look like the average sang poacher. Clearly he had money of his own. Top of the line GPS. Top of the line hiking boots. Top of the line windbreaker, although it looked a size too large for him. More evidence that he was, or had been, really ill.

And she wasn’t really worried about the sang. Far better sang hunters had tried and failed to follow this trail, much less actually find the bed.

“Are you
insane
?” she asked.

Pooka relaxed and sat back on his haunches, but Nick gave her a puzzled look.

“Wha—”

“No, don’t answer.” She threw up her hand. “I apologize. That was an unfair question.” She took a breath. “What are you doing out here?”

Nick looked bewildered for a moment, then he looked down at his pack, and at his GPS, and back up at her again. “Hiking?”

She grimaced.

“
Trying
to hike?” he offered again.

“I suppose you forgot to look at the map I told you about. The one with the trails marked expert and beginner?”

He appeared baffled by her question and fished inside his jacket for a much-used map. “I had one that a guy recommended with the GPS waypoints—”

“This is
private
land,” she said, and felt an instant pang of guilt when he flinched.

“It is?”

She sighed. “Yes it is. This is my family’s land. Has been for generations. It isn’t on that map of yours. It
is
, however, on the map that we provide in the cabin. I don’t mind you hiking it, but I wouldn’t want you to get injured or lost on a trail that’s too difficult for you. I know you signed a waiver, but it would be bad for business.”
 

At that, Nick sat back on his heels, put his hands on his thighs and shook his head. “I don’t know what to say. I— I’m— I mean I
was
lost, pretty much. My GPS went out and then my compass started acting up, back there, so I headed in the direction I thought I had come and I—”

“Got
more
lost.”

“Pretty much, yeah.”

“Well,” she said slowly, enunciating every word. “If you read the instructions at the cabin, there are specific warnings about what to do if you get lost out here. They do
not
include walking further into the woods.”

Nick was looking up at her with the same expression Jamie had the day that Grace found the goats in the lettuce bed—completely guilty and completely preoccupied with getting away with it. Except Jamie hadn’t been pale and sweaty.

He hadn’t struck her as an absolute idiot, but he was certainly acting like one at the moment. Perhaps it was the fever. She crouched down to his level.

“Are you all right? Because, I hate to be blunt, but you look like hell.”

He wiped the sweat off his face with the back of his jacket sleeve. “I might’ve pushed it a bit. I’m…not good at pacing myself, I guess.”

“Well, your doctor should’ve given you specific instructions on how much exercise your body could manage at this point.”

There was that dimple again. “Yeah, well, I’m…not good at following instructions, I guess.”

Grace smiled in spite of herself. “I can see that.”

There was no way in hell that a woman with eyes like that—with a damn
hat
like that—could be hiding a meth operation in these woods. Was there?

“And I thought I smelled something,” Nick said.

Grace scrunched her face up as if she were trying not to laugh at him and having a difficult time of it. “Well, there are a lot of things out here to smell,” she said in that science-teacher voice of hers.

“No, this was weird, like ammonia—a lot of ammonia.”

She stood as if she’d been stung, sniffing the air in all directions and scanning the trees.

He stood with her, looking around. “What?”

“I don’t smell anything like that. Just a trash fire somewhere. Probably the Taggarts—”

“But what was it that you were worried about? What smells like ammonia out here?”
Yes, Dr. Grace, what?

“Well, as I told you last night, some people have reported seeing a big cat out here—a pain—a mountain lion. Sometimes they mark their territory and their food caches—”

“A mountain lion?” No. He knew the smell of a meth lab pretty damn well. It wasn’t like a giant litter box, there was more to it. Sulfur and other fumes. She was right, though, the smell had disappeared beneath the smell of a trash fire. Or he had imagined it.

“Yet another reason not to walk further into the woods when you are lost,” she repeated in that teacher voice again. And, damn her eyes, she was about to smile at him.

For the briefest moment, he had a mental flash of shutting her up by sinking his hand into that hair of hers, and kissing her—hard.

“But that trash fire smelled pretty nasty for a minute there.” She sniffed the air. “Could that have been it?”

He took a deep breath. There was nothing on the air now except her scent. “I—I don’t think so, but hey, I could be imagining things.”
Is that perfume or is that the way you smell all the time?

Nick stepped away from her, making an awkward show of sliding down the embankment to retrieve his battered pack. Dammit! He was on a case—an important case that could ruin lives and reputations and have political repercussions. He did
not
need to look at Dr. Grace as anything other than a potential suspect or innocent bystander. And he didn’t need his body suddenly deciding to wake up and attempt one last fling. And he sure didn’t need his mind to be playing tricks on him.

Maybe he
had
imagined the smell. Maybe he needed to get his carcass back home and hand this over to a healthy agent whose brain cells were intact, because his clearly weren’t. Alison would be happy to settle him into that extra room of hers and force homemade soup on him and nag him into going to the doctor and then… Nope. He’d rather become a quick snack for Grace’s pet painter.

Yanking his backpack loose from the rocks, he climbed back up. He was pretty sure nothing in the pack was breakable, but he made a show of rattling it and poking around inside before shrugging into it.

“I’ve learned my lesson and I’ll follow you from now on,” he said, staring at his shoes.

“Follow me?”
 

He looked up and found her staring at him in dismay. Well
that
bothered her. A lot.

“Back to the house?” he added, with just the right tone of confusion.

“Oh. Of course.” She started to turn away, then looked back. “Are you sure you’re all right? You look— Well, actually you look green around the gills, as Pops would say.”

“Just a little nausea. I’ll live.” He shifted the pack with a grunt. “So Pops? You…actually call your dad ‘Pops’? I haven’t heard that in years.”

She frowned. “Pops is short for Grandpops.” She pulled her own backpack off and crouched over it, taking off her gloves, and digging through the contents. “What my brother always called our grandfather. Logan Woodruff.”

“Oh. Sorry. Trish mentioned that he’d passed away recently. Condolences on your loss.”

She only nodded. He decided to press a little.
 

“The folks down at that tavern where I ate last night called him ‘The Woodsman’. They had some good things to say about him—and this place.”

Her expression changed. A brief flash of pain, and then nothing. “Hopefully you had the trout.”

“It tasted great last night. Right now, not so much.”

There was the barest hint of a smile. “I understand,” she said, continuing to rummage in her pack.

“What are you looking for?”

“Ginger.” She fished out a plastic pill bottle and stood up, undoing the top and tilting it toward him. “Hold out your hand.”

He did so, and a piece of what looked like sugar-dusted candy fell into his palm.

“As long as you’re not on blood thinners, this is safe, and it should help.”

“Ginger, like ginger ale?”

“Exactly. Except most ginger ale has very little real ginger in it.” She put the bottle back in her pack.

“So, do I eat it?”

“Just chew on it. See if it helps. Now—” she hefted her pack and pulled her gloves back on, “—we can sit here until your stomach settles or we can make our way home, slowly.”

He popped the ginger into his mouth. “Don’t slow down for my sake,” he mumbled around the chewy morsel. “I bet this stuff’ll cure what ails me.”
If only it were that simple.

It could
not
be that complicated.
There was no explanation Grace could imagine, sinister or otherwise, that made any sense except that Mr. Nick Crowe was exactly what he said he was: an idiot writing a book who didn’t know his own limits and had likely seen her set out this morning and decided to follow. For one thing, no one could pretend to be as sick as he was. And he was either unaware of it, which would make him rather stupid, or unwilling to admit it, which would make him rather…stupid.

“So, were you born here then?” Nick asked.

Apparently her long silence had gotten to him, or perhaps it was her expression as she looked over her shoulder now and again to see how he was holding up. She hoped she wasn’t glaring at the poor man.

“No.”

There was a huff, then what sounded like a resigned sigh. “So, where were you born then?”

Grace supposed she could be sociable at least, no matter how stupid he was. “Philadelphia.”

“Home of cheese steak and the Eagles. That’s—That’s a long way.”

“Yes.” She could almost feel his frustration as he stared at her back.

“How did you end up here?”

Grace almost smiled. He wouldn’t give up.

“As I said, my grandparents lived here. And my grandfather’s parents and my great-grandfather’s parents and so on. It goes back a ways.”

“But not your parents.” It wasn’t a question, but it was pretty obvious that her parents weren’t around at the moment anyway.

“No. They’re in Philly. Well, my mother and sister are. My father is probably in Washington.”

“D.C.?”

He seemed impressed. And that was another point for “stupid”.

“Yes, sadly enough,” she said.

“Oh, a politician then.”

Perhaps not quite so stupid. “No, not
that
bad,” she said solemnly.

He laughed, and she gave him back another point.

“And you?” she asked.

“For the moment, Washington…D.C.”

“Oh.”
Insert foot in mouth and proceed.
“You’re not a—”

“Politician?” He paused long enough for her to squirm a bit. “No, not
that
bad.”

It was her turn to laugh. Perhaps not stupid at all.

“For the moment? Not for long then?” she asked, turnabout being fair play.

“Well, I—I move around a lot.”

“For the research?”

“That, and the promotional stuff. I decided with so much traveling there was no point in settling in any one place. I’m never there.”

Grace couldn’t imagine that kind of life. Rootless and wandering. She would feel lost. “You don’t call
any
place home?”

There was a pause. “I suppose Cleveland comes close. My mom’s there, and my sister Alison with her son. It’s where I grew up.”

A sister. Alison. Suddenly Nick Crowe seemed a bit more real to her. “So, is Nick Crowe the name you write under? I read, but mostly non-fiction—”

“No, I write under a pseudonym. And mostly fiction. Actually, all my books are suspense type thrillers—political intrigue, spies, drug cartels, and so on.”

But he had said he was
researching
here, not just writing, hadn’t he? And he had been in Colombia— “What on
earth
does Patton Springs have to do with any of that?”